1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to computers, and more particularly to apparatus, method and computer program product embodiments for implementing selective device access control mechanisms in a computing storage environment.
2. Description of the Related Art
Computers and computer systems are found in a variety of settings in today's society. Computing environments and networks may be found at home, at work, at school, in government, and in other settings. Computing environments increasingly store data in one or more storage environments, which in many cases are remote from the local interface presented to a user. These computing storage environments may use many storage devices such as disk drives, often working in concert, to store, retrieve, and update a large body of data, which may then be provided to a host computer requesting or sending the data. In some cases, a number of data storage subsystems are collectively managed as a single data storage system. These subsystems may be managed by host “sysplex” (system complex) configurations that combine several processing units.
Data storage capacities of various media have grown substantially with time, such that a single data storage media is capable of storing many times that of earlier media. One way of handling the data is to have the present media store multiple “logical” units of data that once were the entire capacity of the media. The concept of “logical” units of data is further carried out in the handling of the data in hierarchical data storage servers, where frequently accessed data is stored in faster but expensive memory, and less frequently accessed data is stored in high capacity but slower memory. One example of a fast memory is a direct access storage device (DASD) comprising a disk drive, or a solid state disk (SSD). Examples of high capacity memory are magnetic tape drives or libraries, and disk drive arrays, such as RAID (redundant array of independent disks), or JBOD (just a bunch of disks). Typically, a number of the logical units of data, such as logical volumes, are stored together in the faster memory, and very large numbers of logical units of data are stored together in the slower memory. The logical units of data are typically identified by volume serial numbers (VOLSERs), and may be treated as though they were being stored as “virtual” single data storage media or objects in a “virtual” data storage drive or library, whereas they are actually stored together in files or stacked in physical media.